Alistair Laing's Blog : SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Launch

alistairl — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:42:32 GMT

Arpan Shah has blogged over at Microsoft that May 12th, 2010 is the launch date for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. In addition, they have announced intent to RTM this April 2010. Take a look at the post over on the SharePoint Team Blog which I recommend you keep up to date with if you are interested in SharePoint.

The release of the RTM is quite exciting for us as this is a way for key customers to be ready with SharePoint 2010 ahead of May. If you would like to know more then please get in touch.

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SharePoint 2010 Deployment Planning Services

alistairl — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:28:03 GMT

Earlier this year I wrote a post about the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) programme from Microsoft. This is a way for customers who already have an investment in Microsoft Software to obtain some consultancy days (for no extra cost) to plan to better use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

If you follow my Charteris blog you will have seen that I recently attended a week’s course to prepare for the arrival of the next version of the product, SharePoint 2010, through the Microsoft Ignite Program which prepares Microsoft Partner organisations for new products.

Hot on the heels of this came a recent briefing session where Microsoft prepared us as SDPS partners for a new offering which is aimed at assisting customers to plan for an upgrade of their existing SharePoint investment from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Planning is similar in many ways to the core SharePoint Deployment Planning service, but different in other ways.

Like the other SDPS Offerings, SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Planning comes in different lengths (1,3,5,10 or 15 days) to explore to different depths how you might plan for an upgrade to 2010. And like the other SDPS offerings, it includes an Architectural Design Session, Strategy Briefing Session, Feature overview and labs according to the number of days. And finally, like the others it includes a short list of mandatory deliverables that I and other SDPS consultants have to produce as an output.

But there are also subtle differences in the delivery that perhaps impact us as consultants more than customers. For one thing, SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Planning is a different pitch to our audience. We are no longer trying to help a customer to consider SharePoint from scratch, as the starting reference for this offering is that they already use MOSS 2007. For the engagement this means that our stakeholder community is wider, as it is important to involve those who have established an operational interest in the day to day workings of SharePoint. And instead of exploring a completely new idea we have to make sure that what is already being used extensively is preserved correctly and improved upon by upgrading to a new product. This also means from a delivery perspective as consultants that we explore the impact of the change to the proper depth and explore the plan to the proper level of detail as is entirely appropriate for any upgrade of an operational system. And although SDPS has always been about planning, in the immediate short term we have to remember that SharePoint 2010 is not a released product and implementation on the beta is not supported by Microsoft.

Although SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Planning changes the mix slightly of SDPS, I am very pleased that Microsoft have added this offering to the bundle as it offers customers who are already committed to SharePoint the opportunity to draw on a pool of consultants who can assist with planning work. And the SDPS format allows this assistance to range from a “heads-up” type briefing session all the way through to actually trying a pilot upgrade with an existing site. And of course if you are considering such an upgrade please get in touch to discuss how we can help with this process.

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SharePoint 2010 Ignite on Business Connectivity, Excel and Social Features

alistairl — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:35:59 GMT

In my sixth and concluding post on my week at the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Ignite training for IT Pro I take a look at what we saw of Business Connectivity Services, Excel Services, Social Features and a round up of the week.

This was the final day of this 5 day course in Berlin and brought to a close our broad sweep through SharePoint 2010. Business Connectivity follows from the Business Data Catalog technology in 2007, but with new ideas of External Content Types and SharePoint Designer coming in to the picture. Excel Services was a great new concept in 2007, and has been built upon in 2010, and finally the big social networking thing out on the internet is making more inroads inside of the firewall.

Business Connectivity

As you will have picked up from my earlier posts in the week, I have been trying to add elements from my own experience when commenting on the features presented to us during the week. The folks responsible for planning the content of our week have had a bit of a challenge, a week is a long time for straight training and breaks and hands-on labs provide a bit of variety to assist the attention spans of the audience. On the other hand, SharePoint is a broad product and important subject areas have to be covered. They have to decide which areas are important for Partner organisations to get correct when they head out with SharePoint 2010.

The Business Data Connector is one feature in MOSS 2007 that I must admit to little practical knowledge with. Having evaluated the product and gone through the MOSS exam I know what the product does, but unfortunately personally don’t have the real world experience with it. Part of this is down to the feature split between editions and therefore the licensing implications. MOSS 2007 includes Business Data Catalog in Enterprise edition and this comes with a more expensive top up cal. I can understand features have to be split somewhere, but this has hampered the adoption of what could be a useful tool. That said, connecting new things to “legacy” line of business applications is always a little controversial, security and scalability issues come to the fore. For instance, adding a few hundred new connections to a line of business application because it has the master record for something would effectively result in a denial of service, so these things have to be planned.

So to cut a long story short, the means to define connections and use them has improved – there is no longer the need for nasty xml or running to get seperate tools to define the connection, and now what looks like a normal sharepoint list can be created with read/write capability. There is also the ability to add a column to an existing list that refers to external data. My initial observation is that you have to plan your connection, and anyone familiar with the data access application programming interfaces (api’s) should understand the issues of what can and cannot be viewed with read write.

Excel Services

Again like BDC in MOSS 2007, Excel Services in MOSS was an enterprise feature and brought with it extra cost. That said, for some it limited it’s adoption but at Charteris we were able to carry out considerable work developing against the engine in the background. Our work focussed on Financial Modelling using Excel Services and we pushed it to the extreme in order to extract the best performance while giving the model creators the easiest experience – they just had to use Microsoft Excel.

We of course hit some limitations of what was the first release of the product, and probably because of the way we used it, so it is good to see that it is being taken seriously in SharePoint 2010 and is not only easier to use but also comes with ways to configure how it uses the server which should help with tuning it to the way it is being used.

Microsoft also seem to have embraced the idea of managing the considerable amount of business rules and experience that are embedded in spreadsheets. Of course, part of this is the user experience and this has improved in 2010, albeit not quite at the same level as the full office install of Excel. I’d recommend watching this carefully as it is the natural follow on in the steps from file share, to document library, to document services.

Social Features

I think everyone who has used or seen MOSS 2007 is aware of mysites – the small bit of SharePoint that is yours, the user, to play with. At the Ignite training we had a show of hands by one of the instructors asking us if our clients had asked us to disable mysites. There was quite a proportion (myself included) that raised our hands. The reason for this ? A large proportion of the organisations we work for do not want invididuals to be creating content ad hoc or do not have any mechanism to incorporate an individual that generates content. They are typically large organisations that are coordinated around teams or functions rather than subject matter experts.

I’ve worked in other organisations that appear to discourage individuals finding out more about other departments and individuals. That said, I can’t imagine that they had this as a stated policy, rather that they wanted to discourage time wasting. And time wasting is what many see social networking as, building a network but extracting any business worth from this seems to be a challenge.

It is with those two minds that I approach the social features in SharePoint, on one hand I see real value in coordinating knowledge generation, but on the other hand see that side chat can be seen as time wasting. Like any new technology I think that corporations should keep track of things and form policies, or establish a business benefit and then evangelise this. If they cannot, or they are not ready, then make sure the policy deals with this and the loss of potential is also understood.

SharePoint 2010 in this area builds on previous features but importantly copes with the challenge that the absence of mysites had in MOSS 2007 – some parts to do with user profiles was a bit strange when Mysites were not present and I am led to believe that SharePoint 2010 deals with this more gracefully. Person search has come on leaps and bounds, and again I think that search has an important role in discovery – but also in avoiding duplication of effort in an organisation.

From a personal perspective I see a place for Social Networking, but I am still unclear as to how things will settle at the interface between the social and business world for organisations that are not B2C (i.e. Business to Consumer) or at the interface between Employer and Employee.

Conclusion

I came away at the end of this week of SharePoint 2010 training quite encouraged that the future was looking bright for SharePoint. The things that were working in MOSS 2007 have been improved, tweaked and sorted making it all the more interesting. Yes, the upgrade has a few sore points like 64 bit, but this was a bit inevitable. Above all it looks better which is always important for encouraging more widespread use of the product.

It has also received some scalability improvements so that it is ready to cope and adjust for that point when your tentative steps into the world of SharePoint really pick up. Experience tells me that SharePoint actually tends to be a victim of its own success and you find you need more space and more servers to cope with the appetite of users. So if you are a user then take a look at what it can do to take you beyond file shares in terms of getting organised and helping you find things quicker. If you are an IT professional then please do not regard it as a threat and consider the new management features that allow you to provide a better service to your users.

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SharePoint 2010 Ignite on Enterprise Search and Content Management

alistairl — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:05:31 GMT

In my fifth posting about my attendance at the Microsoft Ignite event on SharePoint 2010, I discuss the material on Enterprise Search and Content Management.

I like search, and when it is implemented properly it makes a huge difference to users in their day to day business. I’ve had a personal fascination through the years with the whole process of finding things to search, opening them up, breaking them apart and indexing them and then storing this in a way that is useful to people trying to get on with their jobs. SharePoint 2010 improves both the user experience and the administration and management of the underlying search infrastructure, and also marks the next stage in the integration of the functionality from FAST.

The other area of Enterprise Content Management is also of interest, though I must admit to a bit of a bias towards Web Content Management as this has been another area that I have worked in for a long time, but SharePoint traditionally bundles all types of content under a common banner.

Enterprise Search - SharePoint

A whole lot of material has already been covered this week at the SharePoint 2010 Ignite event and as the week progresses I have been using the agenda published to attendees to create a mental outline of what are currently seen as the important areas. As you would expect the format is presentation – break – presentation – lunch and so on, with presentations followed by hands-on-labs for the attendees, as it is an instructional event. Search has three sessions devoted to it which is more or less three quarters of the penultimate day. Whatever you read in to this I take it to mean that Search is important and enough is changing in it that needs time to cover.

Of course one of the other reasons for the subject matter’s relative size is the progressive incorporation of the product line from the FAST search company that Microsoft acquired last year. This is another option on the list that starts at the bottom in basic search with SharePoint 2010 Foundation and works up in capability, flexibility, connection and language support in FAST.

I’m pleased to say that the length allocated reflected two aspects that have changed in the SharePoint search landscape, the architecture (certainly in the most part) now incorporates the capability to scale out for performance, but also incorporates resilience in the ability to hand off processing in the event of the loss of a processing unit (my term). Other tweaks also help with this, for instance we still have crawl servers but as soon as they can the index material is persisted to database, meaning that the dependence on a particular crawl/index server is reduced.

The general concepts to search are still there in that content sources are crawled, the material there is taken apart and indexed and then collected together for querying. What has happened to this is that individual elements can be split between separate servers for performance, or parts can be mirrored so that the loss of one does not remove service. A set of crawling machines can be allocated items to crawl into one or more databases, again split for performance or resilience reasons.

What this allows us to do is implement search and add to the overall infrastructure as users capitalise on the facility more and more, if content needs to be more up to date then the machinery at the crawling and index end of things can be expanded. If query performance is suffering then query servers can be added to and indexes partitioned to spread the load.

And all of this is behind the scenes, there have also been a number of additions to the user experience of searching that provides for more tailoring by developers (technically the web parts are no longer sealed), more things to search and new ideas about supporting collaboration.

All in all this means that SharePoint 2010 has a huge amount to offer to Enterprise search and I think goes a lot of the way to support the way that I think people should work. Structure is fine and correct, but there is so much material out there being generated that a search tool is essential for reducing the time spent to find documents, but also to help employees find the material that they may have not found before.

Enterprise Search – FAST for SharePoint

The top of the tree in terms of Microsoft Enterprise Search is FAST. It has retained its name since the product was taken in to Microsoft, but with this release we see a higher level of integration with SharePoint 2010. The overall architecture is similar to SharePoint search but what it does with content indexing goes way beyond what SharePoint can do natively, and then from there it also scales higher and also offers considerably more customisation options for results management.

My impression is that FAST is the product for organisations who are very serious about search as a tool for their organisations and the fine tuning that is possible throughout the product is impressive and gives the impression that it would be the tool of a dedicated team rather than someone in IT switching it on in SharePoint.

Enterprise Content Management

You may have noticed a couple of the enterprise site templates in MOSS called the Document Center and Records Center. These are underused facilities for the management of enterprise content – making sure that items are tracked, stored and archived properly. And this is all out of the box. SharePoint 2010 extends these facilities and I would recommend looking at these again if you did not feel that the document management facilities of MOSS 2007 were strong enough, it could be that they are now.

The other area delved into under this banner was that of metatagging, taxonomy and a new term to me “folksonomy”. The truth is that users do classify documents out there but do not necessarily embrace the structure imposed by company librarians. As ever real world experience suggests that this is down to the perennial problem of over engineering and lack of communication. Again if you do not think that MOSS 2007 had what you needed, or you have tried to implement managed terms and you don’t think it worked – please take a look at it again in the context of SharePoint 2010.

Conclusion

For me the enhancements to search are a major step forward for SharePoint and go beyond the sort and fix that we see in some of the other areas of functionality. Certainly from an infrastructure and performance perspective it is there, but the key question is whether or not it has the right amount of tuning potential that you require. I am certain that from a functional perspective FAST will tick all of the boxes, but my concern (as with SharePoint editions) is whether your business case is sound for the expenditure on FAST.

Enterprise Content Management is not the most exciting of subjects, but demands serious consideration as the more formal aspect of introducing documents into a system to then be filed, found, and managed.

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SharePoint 2010 Ignite on IT Pro customisation and Upgrade

alistairl — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:48:25 GMT

In my fourth blog post about the SharePoint 2010 Ignite Training, I cover the day’s material on IT Pro Customisation and Upgrades.

These two subject areas are the bread and butter of SharePoint implementations. Ideally every customer should want to impose a bit of themselves on SharePoint, from the arrangement of sites, lists, document libraries etc to fit their business to how the layout looks and how it may reflect their own corporate branding. MOSS 2007 could be altered beyond recognition and so can SharePoint 2010, but a central aim of the product is to be able to do as much as possible without resorting to coding.

The rest of the day was devoted to upgrades – in my experience a truly greenfield site is unusual, whether this is because there is already an intranet or internet presence, or more usually because someone already understands the benefits of SharePoint and would like to capitalise on the improvements in SharePoint 2010.

IT Pro Customization (non-code)

The slightly long and unwieldy full title of “IT Pro Customizations of SharePoint (non-code customization)” was a subject area intended to show how far the product can be tailored without opening up Visual Studio 2010 and delving into the object model and .net code. My background is in development so I’m not scared of firing up Visual Studio and the extensions for WSS, but I do understand that the great potential for solving problems in code also limits the types of person in a team who can do it but also the time and risk involved in adding a development project to your overall programme.

The main tool for this job is SharePoint Designer 2010 which has grown a number of new features, as well as working better with the security model in SharePoint 2010. For one thing, the whole process of setting permissions for the main activities of SharePoint Designer are now clearer in the User Interface for the server product. And SharePoint Designer 2010 now abstracts the file system for the user so that they deal solely with objects. This is a great improvement in not only keeping the nastiness of a web file system away from the user but also focusses them on the structure imposed by SharePoint and how they should work with that instead.

SharePoint Designer 2010 comes with neater functionality to work with sites in adding lists, amending columns etc, and the often demonstrated workflow functionality has been updated too. I had also heard about the new ability to use Visio for the creation of workflows and having had a shot I can see where it fits in to the process and how easy it would be to use. There is a new “Microsoft SharePoint Workflow” template in Visio 2010 which includes the Actions and Conditions that should be familiar from workflow design for MOSS 2007. The Visio template concentrates on the steps and the flow, and then the result is exported to file and imported to SharePoint designer for it to fill in the properties and so on needed for the actions to carry through. Whether this split between the tools will work in practice will have to wait and see, but from a brief look it keeps Visio simple without bogging down the various shapes with too many properties.

Customisation Management

This subject area gave more information on the hinted at Sandbox for solutions deployed to farms. Like previous sandbox concepts in the development world this gives a special area of increased isolation that trades off less available functionality for ease of deployment. I was a little surprised to see that ado.net was one of the things excluded from the sandbox, but on reflection the removal of this and other facilities is not as bad as it may seem. Using SharePoint as an application platform should channel our development approach down a certain line – just like previous development in the office applications has done. Each of these bring ease of deployment, but this has traditionally come with a limitation on what can be done. This way of managing solutions enforces a compromise between “IT Pros” managing the SharePoint servers and “Developers” doing things that cannot be done without code. Hopefully developers will be encouraged to write solutions that will run in a sandbox, and IT Pros will support this by allowing these to be deployed in a quicker way than a full solution.

One final point to make is that the impression I get from the level of support and scalability that is given to Sandboxed Solutions indicates that this is being proposed as a controlled production environment. It is not being pitched as a development or test area but as an isolated and heavily managed way of deploying solutions. Certainly in the information presented to us there was no discussion of bedding in or promoting a solution to being a full package, solutions are expected to operate during their entire lifetime within the sandbox.

Upgrade

Again an indication of the importance of this activity is that it was given a half day’s consideration. As with any production upgrade there is a lot of planning to go through and part of this has to be testing to prove the process and to get the clearest idea of what will have to happen when the real work happens.

A big part of the IT Pro exams that I have taken in MOSS 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 are devoted to conducting an upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to 2007 as it is a real world situation for those bringing MOSS 2007 into an organisation. Before that, though, there are prerequisites to consider to even consider the hurdle of an installation and upgrade. This is the first stage to have a hard think. As I have mentioned before SharePoint relies on x64 throughout the platform, and at time of writing needs 8Gb of RAM and a dual core processor. Although a number of sites have made the switch to 64 bit, some have not and suitable hardware will need to be found.

I will not go through the full list of prerequisites as this will move as SharePoint 2010 gets closer to RTM, but an important point is that SQL Server (2005 or 2008) has to be on a specific Service Pack together with separate Cumulative Updates. This is very important to think about if you share your SQL Server resource across applications.

Another point for those that are familiar with the upgrade from 2003 to 2007 is that the gradual upgrade method is not offered in 2010, so further planning is important in terms of managing downtime. A point in favour of 2010 is that the UI can be upgraded separately to the data and other parts so the impact on end-users can be directly managed.

Apart from repeating advice to plan properly and test an upgrade to spot any possible issues with the process, and to obtain some timings, the overall process of upgrading doesn’t strike me as that dissimilar to migrating a 2007 farm to new hardware. That said, the one place that things need to be watched out for are the changes to config handling and the switch away from Shared Service Providers. These changes mean that the sequence of upgrade is important to make sure that downstream dependent functions like Mysites work correctly. Again I would advise keeping track of technet and MSDN on Microsoft.

Conclusion

SharePoint 2010 rearranges the picture slightly in terms of customisation, and the tools of the Web UI, SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio have been rearranged slightly in terms of the capability they offer to each of their users. There is encouraging news in the area of solution deployment and management and this has been thought about properly. In terms of upgrading to SharePoint 2010, I am encouraged that so much testing has already taken place and with appropriate planning and testing an upgrade should be predictable, if not the easiest thing to do because it is a flexible application platform we are dealing with.

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SharePoint 2010 Security, Health and Monitoring

alistairl — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:37:00 GMT

Introduction

In my third post about the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Ignite Training for IT Pro being held in Berlin, I consider the sessions from today covering security, health and monitoring.

I’ve thought long and hard about what to include in this post, on one hand it covers security and this is a very important subject and if I can be candid, not something I can do proper justice to. On the other hand, so much important things are sorted that even a hint is a good thing. The other subject for today was health and monitoring and we heard lots of good news about keeping an eye on your server farms.

Security

If you have read my previous post about what we have learned so far, you would have picked up a theme in SharePoint 2010 of overall improvement and capitalisation on new technology. This is true in the area of security. The improvements pervade all of the way through the product from the client side scripting of web pages, through to how servers communicate with each other and with other products.

SharePoint 2010 works with .NET and IIS like MOSS 2007 does, and therefore we see some of the improvements in the security model and a big part of this is the incorporation of claims based authentication. Until the 2010 Beta goes live I would have a look at this introduction to Claims based Security.

Health and Monitoring

This is another area that reflects the maturity of the product, not only is more information available about operational aspects of SharePoint such as timer jobs, but also that information is better and collected in a more manageable way.

And in what was a pleasant surprise, the Technical Professional Track actually got shown some c# code today – thankfully nobody fainted or rushed from the room, it was a good way to show how simple it is for developers to add custom logging information to support the overall improvement in SharePoint.

In conclusion, what we saw today was a big improvement and went some way to remove some of the unwieldy solutions to integration that the limitations in the security in MOSS 2007 imposed on us. It is also good to see that the tricky authentication provider configuration being replaced by something that, certainly on the face of it, seems to be a more thought out solution that has been planned for rather than bolted on.

But as I said in my introduction I have not (or cannot) do the product justice in this post, so I would recommend keeping track of MSDN as the Beta goes public.

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SharePoint 2010 Ignite Overview and Business Continuity Management

alistairl — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:13:00 GMT

In my second post about the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Ignite Training for IT Pro being held in Berlin, I consider the sessions from today introducing the new product to us and an overview of the architectural changes being brought in.

If you’ve not seen SharePoint demonstrated at one of the list of recent conferences then pop over to Microsoft and catch one of the videos on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 website. Yes it has a ribbon now and I must admit this was (is) one of the trickier things to get used to in Microsoft Office 2007, but having used it for a while in 2010 it actually organises things well and helps a great deal with the wealth of context related operations that happen in SharePoint.

Of course, from a technical perspective the only difference that a User Interface like this really makes is that the load hitting the web front end changes profile, but we all know that it makes the product a lot easier to use and a lot more attractive to people who matter – those who hold the budgets.

Overview of what is new in 2010

Ok, so I am cheating a little and writing this after day two of the Ignite training, therefore I’ve had a couple of days of presentations and hands on labs to mull over SharePoint 2010. The good news is that a lot of the familiar concepts carry over from 2007 to 2010. Central Administration is still there, web applications are still there, content databases and what we do with them is still there and so on. This means that what you have learned for SharePoint administration doesn’t get thrown away. But what has been done is that things have been rounded out. For instance, the idea of Shared Service Providers was a sound one in MOSS 2007 but to me came across in a bit of a straight jacket. The idea of sharing functions between applications seems to have been fixed with Service Applications which are more flexible. Flexibility means more opportunity to get it wrong, but makes a lot more sense.

Over and again the theme is one of improvement borne from the timing of release. For instance, SQL Server Mirroring is a cost-effective way of protecting a database but because this arrived with SQL Server 2005, MOSS 2007 didn’t contain native support for Mirroring. I’d refer you to the Microsoft WhitePaper on Using Database Mirroring with Office SharePoint Server on what can be done with MOSS 2007, but there is now the option to enter the information that allows SharePoint to cope with an automatic failover. This is based on the connection string support that has been in .NET for a while but has now arrived in SharePoint 2010. The caveat as ever is that mirroring has to be set up for each database, it does not automatically configure itself by virtue of adding it to a connection string.

I’ve mentioned the improvements to the UI already, and yes it doesn’t really change what the product does but it has caught up with current opinion on web design and the kind of interactivity that users expect without postbacks to the server with every click.

Another improvement is to use PowerShell for a lot of administrative work. Again PowerShell has only really come of age with Windows Server 2008 which has the commandlets there to carry out operations. It is this that makes the real difference, as pointed out today the best way to learn PowerShell is to think of what you want to do with it rather than to learn it syntactically like another coding language. An indication of how far things have gone in this release is that a shortcut is added to the desktop for a 2010 Management Console in PowerShell.

Things to look forward to in BCM

My earlier mention of SQL Server Mirroring and SharePoint 2010 awareness of it brings me on to our second subject area on day 1, Business Continuity Management. To be honest I hadn’t thought there was as much debate as to what came under this heading but such is, I was wrong. The main take away point for me was proper support for SQL Mirroring, but there are a few changes to things like configuration backups that are very important to know for backing up SharePoint farms. Basically, SQL Server backup will not give complete protection for a farm so it is important that you know what approach will backup what part.

And finally on that subject, a couple of teasers – the ability to look in to a content database that has not been attached to a web application is now supported, and patch management is now something that SharePoint is aware of.

So in conclusion, due to the passing of time we have a number of improvements throughout the product that just work better because of improvements in associated technologies such as Internet Information Server, Windows Server and SQL Server. The User Interface is just nicer to use because of users pushing for richer web based applications that have pushed the use of ajax and other techniques. And finally, things that didn’t quite get there in 2007 have been fixed, hence the arrival of Service Applications and Claims based identity.

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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Ignite IT Pro Training

alistairl — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:21:44 GMT

I kick off a blog posting from a week in Berlin with the full official title of the training course I am attending with almost 80 other “IT Professionals” from Europe and beyond. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Ignite IT Pro Training is directed at Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 certified individuals from Microsoft Partner organisations with the goal of preparing them for the release next year of the next version, SharePoint 2010.

That is where the Ignite term comes from, Microsoft run such events to pre-empt demand for suitably qualified individuals in their new products. For me it is an indication of the role of beta software these days, for instance I understand that the soon to be released public Beta of SharePoint 2010 will offer an upgrade path to the next product. I guess the days are gone when Beta software was heavily restricted, would trash your machines in a random fashion, and you would have to do a clean install with each new released build of the software.

To reflect the skills needed there are two rooms taken for this training at the Marriot hotel in Berlin, one for the “IT Pro” track for those expecting to install and configure the software, and another room of the same size for the “Developer” track for those expecting to develop applications. This initiative comes after a busy few weeks for the SharePoint community. The beta has been out for a few months but subject to strict NDA, with only slight hints that certain people in the community had seen the product but could not say anything about it. This was lifted last month when Steve Ballmer took the stage at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas and out came a flurry of blog postings about the changes to SharePoint.

I understand that Microsoft have been pleasantly surprised by the success of the previous release of SharePoint and this has taught them a number of lessons, one being that those close to the organisation in terms of Partner arrangements need to be up to scratch when the product comes to release. To do this Microsoft have kicked off the Ignite World Tour, which has already run events in Northern America, is now in Europe and moves to India and Asia in the coming months. Microsoft are not charging for the training, which in no way seems to reflect the good quality of the material I have seen so far. The first day has seen an introduction to the product, with members of the product team from Redmond keen to answer questions – quite successfully from what I hear.

But all this effort against a Beta product has certain risks, for one thing it is all subject to change. Thankfully we are at a late stage in the process so I do not think that major features will be dropped out for release time, but UI elements may move around and even some application terminology may change. This makes training quite tricky – screen shots change and some builds are more stable than others.

That all said, I am reassured to see that some of the infuriating or inflexible items in SharePoint have been sorted. For instance, Shared Service Providers finally seem to have come of age in the idea of Service Applications. Sure – the new flexibility that they now have may create a new set of issues, but in the theme of Service Oriented Architecture, and a consumer based model – it makes a lot more sense to me now.

In the meantime we all have to work with SharePoint 2007 in the real world, so a tip for this – remember that 2010 is 64 Bit only so please consider this if you plan to specify up and deploy SharePoint 2007 in the coming months.

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